Egor Fedotov about himself:
I was born on October 15th, 1987 in Kuibyshev (now Samara). I started studying music at school. It was during this period that Father Vladimir Viktorovich taught me the basics of playing acoustic guitar (he also played drums). At about the age of 16, I and my friends put together the first punk rock band, in which I was a guitarist and music writer, but since I gravitated more towards heavy sound, subsequent bands with me were already in the genres of black metal and metalcore. The main bands that influenced me in those years were Burzum, Satyricon,
Dimmu Borgir,
Katatonia, Cradle of Filth, My Dying Bride.
BIO
ДИСКОГРАФИЯ SHIPS FLY UP
2024 - Apostasy (album)
2024 - Apostate (single)
2024 - Only Lovers Left (single)
2023 - Dawn of Sunset (single)
2023 - Genesis (maxi-single)
2022 - Rivers Without Time (album)
2022 - 14 (single)
2022 - Ships Fly Home (single)
2021 - M. I. L. Y. (single)
2020 - Love and Freedom of the Great Ocean (album)
2019 - Ghost Kingdom (album)
2018 - Dream Maker (album)
2017 - Journey to Ranucan (album)
In 2007–2009 I performed at local venues (rock bar «The Cellar», club «Olymp»). These performances helped me gain valuable experience and build connections in the local music scene. Most rehearsals took place in equipped garages or a private house, where we could focus on perfecting our sound and stage presence. One garage was near a psychiatric clinic, which added an unusual atmosphere to our practice sessions.
Once, walking to a rehearsal, we saw someone in a hospital pajama climbing over the clinic’s high wall and hurrying away. It was a rather eerie sight that stayed with us for a long time. Luckily, the person didn’t head towards our garage.
The band also rehearsed in an old wooden house in the private sector. This place had its own unique character and became our second home for many months. The rehearsal space owner was Roma — a tall man with long black hair, a beard, and a deep voice. Musicians respected him despite his intimidating appearance, recognizing his expertise and knowledge of music. Roma was polite but disliked when young metalheads misadjusted amps, creating unpleasant sounds that disturbed the neighborhood. He always explained proper settings calmly and patiently.
One evening, messing with the combo amp settings produced a loud, deafening sound that could be heard blocks away. Roma entered the house, heard the guitar «roar», and, unable to be heard over the screeching noise, yelled: «morons!» Coincidentally, the bad sound stopped at that exact moment, making his curse echo in the sudden silence. The awkward pause that followed was something everyone present remembered for years to come. Though Roma remained polite and professional, we became much more careful with sound settings everywhere, learning an important lesson about respect and proper equipment setup. This experience not only improved our technical skills but also strengthened our bond as a band.
In 2009, as a member and one of the founders of the band Cross One's Heart, I performed in St. Petersburg at the Koma-Fest festival, which was headlined by Boney bands' Kirill Nemolyaev (producer of the Slot), Coma (leader - Alexander Goodwin, guitarist Boney) and December. The curator of my faculty at the University (at that time I was in my fifth year) I didn't want to give the go-ahead for "absenteeism" for a good reason,
but I didn't give a damn and went anyway.
The journey in the reserved car took about 2 days.
When we arrived at the Orlandina club, we were fed a hot pickle for free and escorted to a large dressing room, where, in addition to a sofa, there was also a spacious room with a sink and shower. Suddenly Alexander Goodwin came into the dressing room.
At that time, he was a fairly well-known figure in metal circles (the festival was actually created in connection with his band Koma), especially for us guys from the province. He went to the shower room. At that moment, our bassist (his name is also Alexander) was in it, bending down to the floor, pouring water from a shower can over his head. When Goodwin opened the door and saw that the room was occupied, he tactfully said, "Excuse me," and left.
Sasha, who knew the lyrics of Coma's songs by heart, was greatly impressed by the fact that, striping his hair in an uncivilized pose a couple thousand kilometers from home, he looked back and saw the leader of his favorite band. It's worth noting that we performed well. The St. Petersburg audience greeted us warmly, even shouting "encore!" at the end. On impulse, we wanted to come out again, but the organizers, unfortunately, forbade us to do so, since the time spent on stage was strictly regulated.
Details on:
DARKSIDE.RU и METALLIBRARY.RU
In 2010-2011, there was a pause in performances. I was rethinking my musical worldview. As a result, after much thought, I came to the conclusion that the band was not enough for me to realize my creative desires, and the issue of earning money was acute (performances did not bring any money, rather on the contrary, and rehearsals were also not free.
Our most "fee-based" concert at that time brought such a sum, which was only enough for a taxi home). Even then, my musical preferences were forming into something non-standard for those (and even today's) times.
From the very beginning,
I liked composing music more than performing. And it is instrumental.
And at some point it dawned on me - I have to write soundtracks. This led me into a completely new limitless world, where the flight of fantasy was no longer limited to just electric guitar, bass guitar, drums and vocals. In this world, I felt real freedom and started composing, composing, and composing again. When there were enough demos, I started looking for contacts for game developers.
After much painstaking work, looking for mentions on various websites, forums, portals, as well as on social media. In social networks, I managed to find about two hundred contacts of people related to game development in one way or another.
Fortunately, at that time there were a huge number of new games on Vkontakte, and you could search for them. I scrupulously sent these people my compositions and a business proposal for cooperation. Almost no one answered me. And the rare responses were refusals. I did not despair and believed that everything was not in vain. After a long wait, I received a letter from the well-known company Katauri Interactive (the creators of the iconic Space Rangers and King's Bounty), saying that they liked the music and we can cooperate. Then the guys from Katauri were developing a new game called Royal Quest.
I kept in touch with art director Alexander Yazinin, who became my guide to the world of the game. They showed me screenshots and explained what the mood of the songs should be. So I went to compose. My first "masterpiece" was criticized to the nines. It was absolutely not what was needed. Subsequent "masterpieces" suffered the same fate.
I couldn't get the gist of it.
But, as they say, patience and hard work will wear everything out. And, lo and behold, one of the subsequent versions hit the bull's-eye! The track was named Mysterious Wood. For it, I received the first fee in my life, which I immediately spent on buying a midi keyboard, going to a music store. Before that, I had to compose only with the help of an electric guitar, a regular text keyboard, a mouse, and music software.
The keys have noticeably facilitated this activity. Now the sounds appeared not from clicking the mouse on the piano roll on the monitor screen, but from pressing pleasant black and white keys. Progress! Thus, I wrote over 15 tracks for Royal Quest, some of which have become truly familiar to some players and have not lost their charm over the years. That's how my full-fledged career as a composer began.
My interview for the Royal Quest team:
VK Video | Rutube
Then there were other projects. For example, I've written soundtracks for games like Kuboom and Polywar. It was only later that I found out that they had tens of millions of downloads on the Play Market (I never dreamed of such an audience in the days of the rock band). Later - the legendary War Robots game with already 100+ million downloads (then it was called Walking War Robots). He created a number of tracks for official trailers for her, one of which has garnered almost 4 million views on the game's YouTube channel:
The song "About Death" was used as a musical accompaniment in the dance show
"Nog Een Dan", held in Leiden, Netherlands.
Another large-scale game in my portfolio was the Hollywood Pacific Rim: Breach Wars, the track for which became the property of the Legendary Pictures film company
(read more about this in a special article).
But there were, of course, smaller-scale games.
More projects are available in the PORTFOLIO.
At the same time, I was actively composing music for the Audiojungle stock platform, totaling about a hundred tracks, which were purchased by various bloggers, as well as world-renowned companies.
Thanks to this, one of my tracks became the title track in the epic official trailer for the game Pagan Online, developed by Wargaming (the creators of World of Tanks):
There was another unusual story in the run-up to Journey to Ranucan, related to an American singer who allegedly unknowingly decided to appropriate one of the tracks. I described this adventure in a separate article.
I'll tell you about mixing and mastering releases. Dmitry Linev from Moscow was the sound engineer for 4 albums (Journey to Ranucan, Dream Maker, Love and Freedom of the Great Ocean and Rivers Without Time).
I met him while working on the soundtrack for the game Blast-Off. Dmitry collaborated with the developers and mixed this soundtrack.
Thus, my gaming connections, in a sense, flowed into Ships Fly Up. But the artist of the album was a new person for me - brnstew. It was from her pen that the covers for Journey to Ranucan (as well as the animated video for the track of the same name) and Dream Maker came out.
In 2018, the second album Dream Maker was released, also dreamy, but with touches of gloom. (For more information about all releases, see the MUSIC section).
Further. 2019 and the Ghost Kingdom album, in which I somewhat retreated from the "inspiring" motifs and returned to the origins of my metal youth. An interesting fact from the biography of Ships Fly Up at that time was the dance show "Nog Een Dan", held in Leiden, the Netherlands. His organizer, Rens Borkent, contacted me and informed me that one of the tracks was perfect for their future performance. I was not against using it, and as a result, the troupe had a bright choreographic number performed by three European dancers:
Axel Bourdon (France), Salomé Oliveira (Portugal), Daphne Verhave (the Netherlands), created for the song About Death (translated as "About Death") from Ghost Kingdom.
The theme of death appears in it for a reason. In 2019, on March 15, the day of the release of this album, my father passed away, who taught me the basics of music, introduced me to the Beatles and gave me the first electric guitar in my life. This loss has become one of the most intense experiences of my entire life (if not the most intense). Creativity, as it could, helped to cope with this.
August 2020 - release of the fourth full-length album Love and Freedom of the Great Ocean. As a description at that moment, I had these lines: "One day I despaired. Why, one day. This has happened more than once. At such moments, it is sometimes unclear whether you are testing your Path for strength and truth, or whether he is testing you. Or maybe both. And if the intention is strong, then at such moments something opens up, and it's like you're moving to the next level. You understand that it was necessary. And the answer comes. He has to come. Even if it's worth inventing it yourself. Answering a call is not a dogma read in a smart book. The answer to the call comes from the very depths of our "I". And at that moment, that answer was Love and Freedom of the Great Ocean - Love and Freedom of the Great Ocean, Ships Fly Up's fourth album."
In general, I like to dedicate new releases, whether it's an album or a single, to lines that reflect my attitude to this music, feelings or something else that is simply born by the will of the Great Ocean.
In 2021, the first single was released as a separate work, M. I. L. Y. There are no overdriven guitars and drums in it, just a sensual motif that I just couldn't help but record. In 2022, another experiment was released - Ships Fly Home, in which a cello was added to the lyrical guitars. Later that year, a single titled 14 was released.
This is a mystical number that I may talk about someday. It played one of the key roles in my life.
On October 7, 2022, Ships Fly Up's fifth full-length album, Rivers Without Time, was released. Oddly enough, I wrote the music for it even before I created the project myself. He waited patiently in the wings. The work turned out to be dynamic, which, I think, could become a decent soundtrack for racing games.
It is worth noting that all this time I was an independent musician and released works with the help of distributors (for example, through the American CD Baby or the Dubai Freshtunes), that is, the rights to the music were 100 percent reserved for me. But at the end of 2022, I was contacted by one of the largest Russian labels Rhymes Music with an offer to become their artist, including such popular musicians as pyrokinesis, aikko, Mabie Baby, Macan, Dora, OG Buda, etc. After analyzing and studying the details of the proposal, although losing some of the rights and royalties (and turning into a black sheep among rappers and pop artists), I decided to agree, as this was an opportunity to bring the creativity of Ships Fly Up to a much larger number of listeners, and perhaps even to those who I haven't heard of post-rock, but we could join it.
After agreeing on the legal side and signing the contract, all the albums and singles of Ships Fly Up were transferred to the jurisdiction of Rhymes Music. I have my own manager and support, which is fundamentally different from the distribution one.
As an artist of Rhymes Music, in April 2023 Ships Fly Up released the Genesis maxi-single with two remixes of early tracks: Catch the Moment and Los Oceangeles. I didn't choose them for an experiment, in a sense. I wanted to create something out of the usual compositions that they seemed to gravitate towards themselves. Syntwave has become the main genre, however, as those who have been familiar with Ships Fly Up for days probably know, I rarely limit myself to one direction.
I like to enrich rock with electronics - it gives it a special charm, in my opinion. And I often add a kind of "trailer" or "soundtrack". It probably affects the fact that in many ways my development as a composer was influenced by writing music for games. In Genesis, I left out the main motifs of the tracks and instead of the "usual" rock arrangement, I added noticeably more synthetic instruments, including electronic drums. All this helped to create an atmosphere of cyberpunk, and perhaps a distant future, in my opinion. At the same time, it is not devoid of mysticism and an "alarmingly determined mood," as one of the respected listeners on YouTube noted. I think he hit the nail on the head. It turned out to be a kind of dark syntwave with a touch of epicness and cyberpunk. Anyway, in any case, this music is exactly what I wanted to convey with all these composer's "bells and whistles". I hope I succeeded. I would like to note that this release did not get the expected result in terms of promotion, although it turned out to be the label's efforts in the editorial playlist "Electro without brakes" in VK Music.
In 2023, I started work on the sixth full-length Apostasy. Due to the lack of funds for a sound engineer (the label did not provide such assistance), I spent a lot of time on self-mixing and mastering, but this result could not be called professional. I was planning to release three singles from the album first, and then the album itself. The first single, "Dawn of Sunset", was perhaps the most difficult to realize in the entire history of not only Ships Fly Up, but also my entire musical career. I thought he was going to kill me.
It was that hard. I've reworked the sound of the track many times, literally without sleeping for days. In addition, I found out that the label is not going to promote my music, as its interests are now focused on a completely different genre (very popular with teenagers). In this regard, I hastily canceled the release and began to seek termination of the contract, as the whole point of cooperation was lost. This process took about 2 years.
In the second half of 2023, I finally managed to establish the financial side of the work on the album, and I invited a new sound engineer Maxim Larikov from Novosibirsk. After completing the work, I released three singles one after the other over the course of several months:
Dawn of Sunset, Only Lovers Left and Apostate, and then, as a logical culmination, the album Apostasy on May 31, 2024. I no longer considered Rhymes Music as a publisher, so after analyzing it, my choice fell on Amphibians Records (now Mediadice) distributor. Unfortunately, I didn't even know at the time what a mistake I had made by cooperating with this company. Working with her turned into constant problems with releases and total disregard of my requests to solve them, as well as long-term non-payment of royalties (you can read more about the whole story in my posts on VK or Telegram). It was only after I made this situation public that it got off the ground and finally came to an end, namely, my early departure from this company.
2024 marked the end of collaboration with the Rhymes Music label. We managed to come to an agreement, and we terminated the contract by agreement of the parties, as a result of which all Ships Fly Up releases published before 2024 became available to me again. To keep them from disappearing from streaming sites, I started looking for a distributor again. Yourtunes became it.
2025 is the year in which there was a noticeable jump in the popularity of Ships Fly Up on Yandex Music (over 70,000 monthly listeners and more than 22,500 subscribers), exceeding the figure of 1 million listens per year. I assume that one of the reasons was the departure from Mediadice. Thus, the project was confirmed in the list of the 15 most popular performers in the genre of construction on this site.
Another feature of this period was that some of the tracks Ships Fly Up began to be broadcast in public institutions in dozens of cities in Russia and in some places in Kazakhstan.
The objects were shopping malls, cafes, restaurants, barbershops, shops, etc.
For example, in the summer of 2025, there were more than 5,000 reproductions at 473 sites.
In the same year, the track Catch the Moment became the musical accompaniment in the official trailer of the search and rescue team "LizaAlert", dedicated to its 14th anniversary, which has already collected more than 300 thousand views:
I also had the experience of creating soundtracks for Malaysian short horror films in 2016 (this is also in a separate article).
But in 2017, I was lucky enough to be one of the composers of the already Russian short film Latte from director Anton Levkovsky, in which the actors starred:
Artur Sopelnik (Physical education teacher, Ranetki, Cadetship), Daniil Dubinin (Interns, Sled, Daddy's daughters, Kulagin and partners), Kristina Bekanova (Method).
During the period of 2016–2017, just like back in 2010–2011, a new major stage began, accompanied by deep philosophical rethinking. One day, while walking down the street, I lamented to myself that there was no music in the world that I personally liked 100%.
This rather simple reason grew into a huge part of my life. I came to the idea of creating my own music project. This is how Ships Fly Up was born. In it, I combined my «soundtrack» experience with a love for experimental atmospheric rock music.
There was a union of soul and mind, to put it in terms of Transurfing of Reality. Which, by the way, also played its role, since one of the tracks from the debut album «Journey to Ranucan», with the symbolic title «The Way of the Heart» (Path of the Heart), became the musical accompaniment in the official teaser of «Live Broadcast with Tufti», supported by writer Vadim Zeland. It is noteworthy that the entire meeting took place to my tracks, which were selected by Tufti.
It is noteworthy that the whole meeting was held under my tracks, which Tufty chose.
In 2012, I had the opportunity to meet an amazing man, a traveler and researcher of the mysteries of the Earth, Andrei Yuryevich Sklyarov (unfortunately, now deceased). I am interested in the mysteries of history, and inspired by Andrei's documentaries, I suggested that he write a soundtrack for his future works. He agreed. As a result, I became one of the composers of a two-part film based on the expedition to Greece, which has garnered more than a million views on YouTube.
He entered the famous cycle "Forbidden themes of history".
A similar story happened with the large-scale game CATS: Crash Arena Turbo Stars,
the developers of which (ZeptoLab) used my track in the trailer, which has gained almost half a million views on YouTube:
Not everyone knows, but I've had decent experiences with vegetarianism, veganism, and even a raw food diet. In this area, I managed to collaborate a little with a well-known naturopathic doctor, the author of healing techniques, Mikhail Sovetov.
I wrote a music screensaver for his YouTube channel "Mikhail Sovetov School of Health", which is used in many releases. A mention of me can be found in the official VK community in this post.
Егор Федотов
Егор Федотов, примерно 2005-2007
Егор Федотов (слева), клуб "Олимп"
Егор Федотов (с гитарой и бутылкой), рок-бар "Подвал"
Гудвин и Федотов, Кома-Фест, 2009
Егор Федотов (слева), Кома-Фест, 2009
"Латте" (кадр из титров)
"Латте" (кадр из фильма)
"Следы греческих богов" (кадр из титров)